Looking back on its development, Anonymous is a collection of bodies that became organized, whose Stimmung takes concrete form as images and gestures.
Yet the gathering-of-beings that reveals a Stimmung is not the image of a single body , but a multitude of concrete human bodies. The method of organization and composition of Anonymous differs profoundly from previous social movements, as it organizes almost entirely over the Internet and is composed of a truly global cross-section of society, consisting primarily of the unemployed and youth.
Although it has some structural affinity with anarchism, Anonymous tends mostly to self-identify as a global movement against corruption and repression, primarily interested in the accountability and transparency of institutions, as well as in support of a somewhat fuzzy notion of popular democracy, with only the vaguest of connections with any historical revolutionary Left.
In its earliest incarnation, the vast majority of its participants did not really consider themselves even to be doing politics, but simply expressing themselves, having lulz, or trying to perform the right ethical act.
However, as Anonymous became involved in activities such as defending WikiLeaks and offering support to revolutionaries in the Arab Spring, more of Anonymous considered themselves as participating in explicitly politically engaged direct action. Of particular importance is the fact that the extremely decentralized nature of Anonymous means anyone can join and participate in any way they choose.
As such, Anonymous is the classic example of a decentralized network, and as many of the participants rarely if ever meet outside the Internet, the ability of Anonymous both to increase its numbers and to survive the arrests of participants is higher than most other organizations.
However, there are a number of common factors that deserve commentary. Although the original meme came from 4chan. These chat channels have hundreds of people on them chatting in the strange cant of 4chan, with various channels existing for different languages such as French and Spanish.
In these chat channels, ideas for actions and news are spread, as is various informal gossip. Instead of a simple anonymous non-identity, various pseudonyms often of a humorous nature are often self-identified in order to distinguish the people in the chat room, although many people use multiple chat channels with both multiple pseudonyms and anonymous identities.
Very basic security precautions are used in order not only to be anonymous in name only, but to prevent governments or other repressive forces from tracking down their presence in the IRC channel to a particular physical computer, with VPNs being popular. In particular, the methods used by Anonymous are easy to use, as they taking advantage of the open sourcing of tools such as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon to let almost anyone with a computer participate in the kinds of denial-of-service attacks needed to bring down sites like Visa and PayPal, although security flaws in some early versions of this software are precisely what led the FBI to arrest some of Anonymous for participating in these attacks.
The thing about Anonymous is that it escapes the grasp of power by opacity. While the stereotype of Anonymous, particularly on 4chan, was of sexist year-old boys, what has been revealed is that 4chan and Anonymous are as global as any Internationale and include many women and transgender people. One of the most famous hackers of Anonymous and Lulzsec, Kayla, claimed to be a year old girl but was instead a year old unemployed ex-army veteran from South Yorkshire — and one of the core arrests of Lulzsec, Tflow, was a year old in London who was one of the more talented hackers in the group.
The group is also multiracial. For example, the infamous hacker Sabu, who was involved in both Anonymous and Lulzsec, was a year-old unemployed New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent who began working for the FBI when his children were threatened.
Less well known arrests testify to the internationalism of Anonymous, including arrests in the Dominican Republic, Spain, Turkey, Chile and Romania. In Eastern Europe the protests against ACTA that were sparked in part by Anonymous were the largest street demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Bloc governments. One can only suspect that a far larger section of the population enjoys the freedom of expression that Anonymous provides: those who are marginalized for reasons of class, age, gender, as well as those who simply live in a remote places where no other form of political expression is easily available, all find a vital new form of politics in participating in the actions of Anonymous.
The issues of censorship and anonymity may be the kernel of a distinctive political spirit of the Internet that resonates far more widely than those involved in traditional politics, including those of the radical strain, may expect. The philosophy of Anonymous offers insight into a long-standing political question that has gone un answered with often tragic consequences for social movements: what does a new form of collective politics look like that wishes to go beyond the identity of the individual subject in late capitalism?
The ontological power of the lulz, the inhuman laughter of the Internet, is our first clue, and it should not be underestimated as a beacon of hope; those who bear the brunt of the crisis can even find laughter in the face of the current catastrophe. What has been discovered by the largely unemployed and marginalized participants in Anonymous gives flesh to the currently deserted world of politics and post-political theory, whose potential was only glimpsed during the alter-globalization movement.
From the comfort of their laptop, anyone can be respected for their actions rather than their identity. Further, in places like Tunisia and Egypt, unemployed youth can cause the revolutionary overthrow of dictators, and a year-old with a laptop can show their power to be paper tigers in the realm of cyberspace.
Anonymous demonstrates, albeit almost without any self-consciousness, nothing more than the forgotten memory of social movements. Anonymous is almost too simple a dialectical tale, a glimpse of what comes after the collapse of the networked individual, the negation of that excessive individuality of Facebook which inscribes digital identity at the cost of constant surveillance.
The truth is that the Internet is simultaneously a machine of surveillance and a space for the free play of identity, and both aspects need to be affirmed and overcome in order to move the world out of crisis.
It is still very possible that the fascinating story of Anonymous will be stopped by excessive prison sentences often more than ten years in the USA and that the taking down of websites may itself be a form of censorship. Those concerned with their fate should stand in solidarity with the arrested via the FreeAnons Anonymous Solidarity Network. While the Anonymousas-it-is is itself already trapped, captured and defeated as it becomes labelled and controlled by the very predicates it inscribes upon itself the Guy Fawkes mask, for example or has inscribed upon it by the hysterical attacks on it by the mass media , the philosophy of Anonymous provides a hint of what may be entailed by a more general analysis of the ontological forces released by the Web, a task still barely begun.
As capitalism destroys the ontological ground of the individual subject via digital identity and mass unemployment, these new collective forces will, amplified by the Internet-like Anonymous, become increasingly powerful. There is a storm of singularities on the horizon. But what do we call it? The Journal of Anonymous Philosophy?
Pseudonymous Philosophical Quarterly? Nameless Nous? Unidentified Philosophical Objections? Very cogent and intelligent comment!! Love the title suggestions. It might be that for submissions being seriously considered not desk rejections the author would have to provide some reason s for wanting to publish anonymously. It could open up all kinds of new issues in the discipline that few were willing to discuss previously.
It could make reading philosophy articles extraordinarily fun. Both would be a huge benefit to philosophy. Of course, I can also imagine a journal like that failing.
There might not be many people willing to publish there. The quality of the articles might be low due to a dearth of submissions. But will anyone be significantly harmed if an experimental philosophy journal turns out to be a dud? As a mild follow-up to earlier comments, the reason that I agree with the idea — and with Peter Singer — is that people underestimate the risk of self-censorship due to fear.
There are enough well-publicized problem incidents in the last year or so involving publications on several topics that people may reasonably be afraid to touch some issues.
This is even more significant for people who teach and do research on philosophical issues in authoritarian states or theocracies. In some places, one does not even need to work at a university to suffer adverse consequences.
It is enough to publish on a problematic or forbidden topic. This is also the case for those who publish on specific topics in mildly authoritarian democracies — for example, any potentially critical topic touching on the royal family of Thailand, on past monarchs, or on projects sponsored by the royal household places the author at risk of a jail sentence under the law of lese majeste.
And these days, there is evidence to suggest that some colleges and universities in the United States have a troubled relationship with both. By and large, I agree with all the objections that opponents of this idea raise. It is indeed a bad idea — and I continue to believe that it may be worth considering for all those many people who might not dare to publish on these topics given the examples made of others who have done so.
Will a topic subject you to FaceBook attack? Perhaps not. Might it get you fired from a college that requires adherence to the literal authority of Biblical text? Ken Friedman Report. Is this a greater threat than Hobbes faced when the monarchy fell? And so on. Below are abstracts and recordings of the talks. It was not at all rare for early modern philosophers to publish or circulate their work anonymously. In fact, nearly all commonly studied early modern figures did so at least once: Descartes, Spinoza, Conway, Locke, Masham, du Chatelet, and Hume, to name just a few.
Nevertheless, the early modern period is also a period in which named authorship becomes more and more important. It is in this period that ideas come to be viewed increasingly as the property of those who first expressed them, and in which authors come to expect to be given credit when others make use of their ideas. This is evident, for instance, in the heated dispute between Leibniz and Newton over the invention of the calculus.
Some early modern philosophers even argue for intellectual property rights explicitly. My paper aims to show that as a result of this new attitude toward named authorship, anonymity also takes on a different meaning for both authors and readers. More specifically, the paper explores the shift in attitudes toward named authorship—and, relatedly, toward anonymity—that appears to coincide roughly with the transition from the medieval to the early modern period.
While medieval authors were not all that interested in putting their name on their work, renaissance and early modern authors were usually eager to do so, except in special cases. The article, if you can get access it to it, has masses of citations of other work. I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but it seems to me relevant. There is a question in epistemology and philosophy of language concerning what one is epistemically committed to when one says something. That is, should what you say be true?
Should you know that what you say is true? Is it sufficient that you believe that it is? There's a parallel question of what can one infer from what is said: can you infer that the speaker believes their claim? That they know it? Recently, Sanford Godlberg has focused on anonymous assertion in light of these questions.
He argues :. If this is correct, the phenomenon of anonymity provides us with a lesson regarding ordinary assertions: their aptness for engendering belief in others, and so for communicating knowledge, depends in general on the very publicness of the act of assertion itself.
There's also a short discussion of anonymous assertion in the SEP entry on assertion. As already noted there can be legitimate reasons for writing anonymously, and there are considerations regarding the content I'll just offer some further thoughts along these lines:. Firstly an author may feel that their argument may be unduly bolstered by their name being attached to it, that is they might want the argument to be evaluated in an authority neutral environment.
The converse can also be legitimate: a writer may feel that their name or lack thereof can detract from the value of their argument. As for content, an argument using generally accepted facts can be judged on the basis of the argument alone, in other words without reference to authority. However when facts are new or controversial the author should stand behind their statements by their own authority their name or by external reference recognized subject authorities.
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